Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay; leaving doters upon red and white perplexed by incertainty both of the continuance of their mistresss kindness and her beauty, both of which are necessary to the amorists joy and quiet.

Our Saviour would love at no less rate than death; and from the supereminent height of glory, stooped and debased himself to the sufferance of the extremest of indignities, and sunk himself to the bottom of abjectedness, to exalt our condition to the contrary extreme.

Divers things we agree to be knowledge, which yet are so uneasy to be satisfactorily understood by our imperfect intellects, that let them be delivered in the clearest expressions, the notions themselves will yet appear obscure.

Since a few minutes can turn the healthiest bodies into breathless carcasses, and put those very things which we had principally relied on into the hands of our enemies, it were little less than madness to repose a distrustless trust in these transitory possessions or treacherous advantages which we enjoy but by so fickle a tenure. No; we must never venture to wander far from God upon the presumption that death is far enough from us; but rather, in the very height of our jollity, we should endeavour to remember that they who feast themselves to-day may, themselves, prove feasts for the worms to-morrow.

This sublime love, being, by an intimate conjunction with its object, thoroughly refined from all base dross of selfishness and interest, nobly begets a perfect submission of our wills to the will of God.

For though I am no such an enemy to matrimony as some (for want of understanding the raillery I have sometimes used in ordinary discourse) are pleased to think me, and would not refuse you my advice (though I would not so readily give you my example) to turn votary to Hymen; yet I have observed so few happy matches, and so many unfortunate ones, and have so rarely seen men love their wives at the rate they did whilst they were their mistresses, that I wonder not that legislators thought it necessary to make marriages indissoluble, to make them lasting. And I cannot fitlier compare marriage than to a lottery; for in both he that ventures may succeed and may miss; and if he draw a prize he hath a rich return of his revenue: but in both lotteries there is a pretty store of blanks for every prize.

Nature sometimes means the Author of Nature, or Natura naturans; as, Nature hath made man partly corporeal and partly immaterial. For Nature, in this sense, may be used the word Creator. Nature sometimes means that on whose account a thing is what it is and is called; as when we define the nature of an angle. For nature, in this sense, may be used, essence or quality. Nature sometimes means what belongs to a living creature at its nativity, or accrues to it at its birth; as when we say, a man is noble by nature; a child is naturally forward. This may be expressed by saying, the man was born so, the thing was generated such. Nature sometimes means an internal principle of locomotion; as we say, the stone falls, or the flame rises, by nature. For this we may say, that the motion up or down is spontaneous, or produced by its proper cause. Nature sometimes means the established course of things corporeal; as, nature makes the night succeed the day. This may be termed established order, or settled course. Nature sometimes means the aggregate of the powers belonging to a body, especially a living one; as when physicians say that nature is strong, or nature left to herself will do the cure. For this may be used, constitution, temperament, or structure of the body. Nature is put likewise for the system of the corporeal works of God; as, there is no phnix or chimera in nature. For nature, thus applied, we may use, the world, or the universe. Nature is sometimes, indeed, taken for a kind of semi-duty. In this sense it is better not to use it at all.

As rivers, when they overflow, drown those grounds, and ruin those husbandmen, which, whilst they flowed calmly betwixt their banks, they fertilized and enriched; so our passions, when they grow exorbitant and unruly, destroy those virtues to which they may be very serviceable whilst they keep within their bounds.

To forego the pleasures of sense, and undergo the hardships that attend a holy life, is such a kind of mercenariness as none but a resigned believing soul is likely to be guilty of; if fear itself, and even the fear of hell, may be one justifiable motive of mens actions.

Rare qualities may sometimes be prerogatives without being advantages; and though a needless ostentation of ones excellencies may be more glorious, a modest concealment of them is usually more safe; and an unseasonable disclosure of flashes of wit may sometimes do a man no other service than to direct his adversaries how they may do him a mischief.

It is very possible (to add that upon the bye) that after the light of the moon has (according to what I have lately noted) represented to our contemplator the qualifications of a preacher, it may also put him in mind of the duty of a hearer.

It is not oftentimes so much what the Scripture says, as what some men persuade others it says, that makes it seem obscure; and that, as to some other passages, that are so indeed (since it is the abstruseness of what is taught in them that makes them almost inevitably so), it is little less saucy, upon such a score, to find fault with the style of the Scripture, than to do so with the Author for making us but men.